


Red

by FloreatCastellum



Series: Marauder Moments [7]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Bittersweet, But the symbolism, Creation of Harry, F/M, Gen, Halloween, I know the dates don't quite add up, Party, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:22:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25577254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FloreatCastellum/pseuds/FloreatCastellum
Summary: James spends Halloween 1979 with his friends and new wife at a party most of the wizarding world would be scandalised at. He had no idea that such a silly, fun night would change everything - and seal his doom.
Relationships: James Potter/Lily Evans Potter
Series: Marauder Moments [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1474679
Comments: 14
Kudos: 100





	Red

James Potter was covered in blood, a gruesome-looking injury down one side of his face. But Remus Lupin was approaching him quite calmly, in completely normal clothes. ‘What are you supposed to be?’ he demanded. 

Remus shrugged. ‘Werewolf.’ Lily and Peter both laughed. ‘They look like everyone else.’

‘I think they look like wankers,’ said Sirius, who was dressed as the lead singer of The Hobgoblins, except dead. Remus stuck two fingers up at him and sat at the patio table with them, taking the joint Sirius lazily passed him. From behind them, the house thrummed with music and the chatter of the rest of the party. 

‘What are you meant to be anyway?’

‘I’m dead! Clearly!’

‘Well, that’s not very imaginative. It might look like I’m being lazy to an outsider, but I’ve actually gone with an inside joke, which is very clever.’

‘It’s not in the spirit of things, Moony, you should have at least stuck some fur on,’ said James. He looked at Lily with a grin. ‘Tell him, Mrs Potter.’ 

‘Good god, how many more months are we going to have to endure this?’ said Sirius despairingly. ‘We get it, you’re married.’ 

‘You’re just jealous,’ said Lily, taking the joint back from Remus, who was nodding in agreement with Sirius.

‘Ah, Lily,’ said Srius, tilting his head. ‘You’re very attractive, but-’

Lily blew smoke out of the corner of her mouth, her eyes shining mischievously in the darkness. James felt an excited lurch in the pit of his stomach, as though he was a lovestruck teenager again and they hadn’t spent the past two months in near-constant newlywed bliss.

‘No,’ she interrupted, ‘you’re jealous of me - you’d love to be married to James.’ 

They all laughed teasingly, jeering, and Sirius gave a playful wink at James, who mockingly kissed at the air before taking the joint from Lily and taking a hefty drag.

‘Sadly, Lily, the law doesn’t allow it, and you stole his heart away years ago. Besides, it would never work, ‘cos he drives me up the fucking wall.’ 

‘Who’re you going to settle for, then?’ asked Peter. 

Sirius peered back at the house. ‘I saw Mandy Butler in there earlier, thought she gave me a bit of a saucy look-’

‘She hates you,’ James informed him, through slight coughs as the smoke tickled the back of his throat. ‘You never sent her an owl after last time.’ 

‘Wasn’t any need,’ Sirius shrugged. ‘Ah well. I am running out of women though, they all know me from school.’ 

‘Perhaps you need to continue to annoy your parents and settle down with a muggle,’ suggested Remus. 

Sirius grinned roguishly, and looked at Lily. ‘You’ve got a sister, haven’t you, Mrs Potter?’

Lily snorted. ‘Good luck with that, she’s married-’

‘To an absolute arsehole,’ James chipped in as he passed the joint back to Peter, completing the circle. ‘He is!’ he insisted as Lily elbowed him lightly and tutted. 

‘You’re so judgy, give him a chance - we might warm up to him eventually-’

‘Yeah, maybe,’ said James, and he looked over at Remus with an exaggerated expression of exasperation - Remus collapsed into stifled giggles. 

‘Be nice!’ she told them, but her lips twitched. ‘He’s just a… a lot to deal with.’ 

‘He called me a magician,’ said James sourly, as they all laughed. ‘I mean, in fairness perhaps I shouldn’t have been sawing that glamourous assistant in half but I was insulted all the same.’ 

‘Waistcoat and top hat probably didn’t help you either, mate,’ said Sirius. 

‘No, not really, but he shouldn’t have presumed.’ 

They laughed again - it was starting to hit them now, everything felt a little bit fuzzy, and it was almost like the laughter led the jokes. The good mood washed over him. Lily looked fucking fantastic dressed as a devil - she’d complained that it was cliched and cheesy, but again and again his eyes were drawn to her, especially when she laughed. 

‘You all right, Pete?’ asked James, who had just noticed Peter staring at him. 

Peter blinked slowly, and slowly dragged his slightly red, glassy eyes up at James. ‘You know… you know at school?’ 

‘Yeah,’ said James slowly. 

‘You know the Bloody Baron? What was… what was that guy’s… deal?’ 

They all burst out laughing - everything seemed much funnier on nights like this, when the smoke made the air hazy and sweet smelling. 

‘You know… with all the blood. Why?’

‘I don’t know, I suppose he was just covered in blood when he died, just like Moaning Myrtle was in her uniform,’ said Remus. 

‘Thank Merlin it was blood so he fit in with the Slytherin vibe,’ drawled Sirius. ‘Wouldn’t have been half as sinister if he’d been covered in… in mashed potato or something.’ 

They fell about laughing again, clutching at their stomachs, wheezing into silence. ‘Food fight death,’ gasped Lily, her shoulders shaking. ‘What a way to go.’ 

‘I’ve never thought about that,’ said James, finally dragging his eyes away from his wife. ‘What you die in - you’re stuck with it. That’s your ghost outfit, forever.’ 

‘Fuck, that’s a lot of pressure,’ said Sirius. 

‘Right? I’m going to make sure I look pretty sharp for every single Order mission from now on.’ 

‘What if you don’t get a chance?’ asked Peter. ‘What if… what if you have a heart attack in the shower or something?’

The idea of a naked ghost was even funnier, particularly when they all, in messy unison, tried to jokingly claim it as a costume for next Halloween. 

‘Moony, if you killed me on a full moon-’ began James, but Remus wince. 

‘Oh, don’t…’ 

‘No, no, no, hear me out,’ James said, waving his hand lazily. ‘If you, you know, got me by the throat or something and just snapped my neck-’

‘Fucking hell…’

‘Blimey, Prongs…’ 

‘But if I was transformed at the time - would I be a ghost deer?’

They all paused, the music from the house still thudding. ‘No,’ said Lily slowly. ‘Nah, you’d transform back, the spell would break.’ 

‘Would it? It’s not like a normal spell though, is it? And if it was really sudden, if it was just properly instant…?’

‘Galloping around the highlands forever,’ said Peter, in a deliberately spooky voice. 

‘Well, we can try it out on Sunday,’ said Sirius. 

‘What, kill me?’ 

‘Yeah, to advance magical knowledge. I know how much you want to go down in the history books - we could do that for you.’ 

‘Cheers, mate. You’d be up for that, would you, Moony?’ 

‘I’d kill you as soon as look at you, James,’ said Remus affectionately. 

‘I’m lucky to have such good friends.’ 

The music from the house changed, there was a slight whistling sort of noise, but still with a heavy disco bounce. ‘Ooh, James! It’s that muggle song from the wedding!’ squealed Lily, leaping up and seizing his hand. 

‘I… honestly, Lily, I feel like all my bones are sinking into the floor, I just want to eat something and lie around.’ 

‘No, come on! [em] Half past twelve…[/em]’ 

He relented, and allowed his wife (his wife!) to lead him by the hand into the house, full fit to burst with people stumbling around in all manner of ridiculous costumes and floating carved pumpkins with flickering, sinister smiles, everyone indulging in this new excuse to have a party that the Daily Prophet had described as “an outrageous cultural transplant from American muggles” which “threatened traditional wizarding values”.

Quite frankly, James thought, as his wife snaked her arms around his neck and swung her hips as she sang along, he couldn’t give a flying hippogriff about traditional wizarding values. 

They danced for hours, breathless and drunk and laughing. ‘You’re amazing,’ James told her at some point in the night. ‘The amazing Mrs Potter.’ 

She was so stunningly beautiful, and somehow he had done it. She was his, forever, presuming she didn’t wake up one day, realise she’d made an awful mistake and ask for a divorce. He could drown in those green eyes forever, they pierced out at him as she danced - the drugs seemed to have slowed things down slightly, the light caught on the red sequins of her jacket as she rolled her shoulders; she had such joy about her. They were still kids, really, though at the time he didn’t feel it. Getting drunk and high and dancing until the early hours feels like an immensely adult thing to do, especially when you are newly married, until you look back and think, those were the days - those were the days when we had no fucking clue what responsibility really was or how much we would love our son falling asleep in our arms, or how the vast majority of people dancing around us would end up dead, and perhaps we will too. 

James often thought about the light on those sequins, over the next two years. How they had made Lily shine, out everything about her was red and smooth white skin and those striking green eyes, the eyebrows that raised in smug realisation as he stared at her. How, in their giddy, intoxicated haze, so much sillier by the end of the night, they had staggered to the hearth and floo’d home, he still covered in fake blood but the gruesome injury long fallen off, she with her devil horns slightly entangled in her dark red hair, both of them kissing furiously, still spluttering with hysterical giggles every time they broke apart to hop about trying to get their shoes off as quickly as possible, Lily shrieking in slightly fearful delight as he threw her over his shoulder and carried her unsteadily up the stairs. 

He had thrown her down onto the bed, and for the rest of his life he would remember crawling over her as she laughed so joyfully as she pulled off his glasses for him, kissing her deeply as she ran her fingers through his messy hair, the sequined jacket glinting in the warm yellow light from the lamp, discarded on the floor like a little pool of glistening blood. There was nothing to suggest that time was any different to all the other times, nothing special about their bodies moving and writhing, the remnants of his costume staining the sheets, nothing world-changing (any more than usual, that is) of Lily’s green eyes burning into his soul, nothing in their moans and cries and sighs and whispers that made them think of anything like destiny or fate or anything of much consequence at all - beyond the very happy warmth it left them both in. 

Much later, as he held his son and looked down into his beautiful face, he wondered how such a perfect, world changing person could have been made in such a night of childish, silly irresponsibility. If it had been something exceedingly romantic, or dramatic - like if one of them had had a near miss during some Order job that day and they’d made love out of a desperate gratitude that they were alive, or if there had been a storm outside, or if they had been doing anything at all that wasn’t smoking and drinking and dancing wearing stupid costumes - that would have made sense. It would have made sense that their special child had been made on a special night. It did not make sense that they had giggled and teased each other all the way through, that his head had been swimming with illegal substances, that Lily had burst out laughing afterwards when she realised she’d forgotten to take out her ridiculous plastic horns. But then, he thought, as Harry’s hands grasped for the coloured puffs of smoke erupting from James’s wand, squealing with laughter, that hadn’t been what that night was at all. It was Lily’s joy and beauty and his impulsiveness and overwhelmed delight at his luckiness that he had somehow managed to marry such a remarkable woman.


End file.
